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I am quite sure that I am not alone in having regrets about something I should have done but didn’t. There must be loads of people who once fancied a dabble on some dark-horse penny-share but decided not to take the risk and then watched it go stratospheric. Or perhaps they once thought of a great product -idea but couldn’t be bothered to pursue it only to see that same product in the shops five years and later selling like hot-cakes.
For me, it was the hit-stage play that I envisaged but never wrote. It was about a young couple who met at University in the sixties while they were both throwing themselves headlong into the counter-culture revolution as a means of rejecting the stuffy, conservative values of their staid, suburban parents.
Fast forward three decades and they are now both pillars of the Nulabour establishment. He is a journalist and she is a human rights lawyer. Their Islington home is a shrine to their innumerable cherished causes. Life is a series of earnest campaigns fuelled by a diet of polenta with rockett salad, washed down by ‘fairtrade’ Nicaraguan coffee. They are comfortable, happy cadres of the metropolitan elite blessed with an unshakeable moral certainty.
Until, that is, their teenage daughter returns home from University where she has discovered Ayn Rand and become a fiery devotee of free-market capitalism.
Then the comedy begins.
At the time I was jobbing as a scriptwriter churning out formulaic boilerplate for cable television and being quite handsomely rewarded for doing so. I had the basic characters and the outline plot but I suppose I was too addicted to the money stream to take the time off that actually writing the damn thing would have necessitated. So it never got written.
And now, it’s too late. What would have been groundbreaking comedy has been overtaken by reality: [From UK Times so no link]
Seventeen years after Huey Lewis and The News sang Hip to be Square, young people are joining the Tory party as a way of rebelling against their Labour-voting parents.
The Times interviewed new recruits and found many from a staunch Labour or Liberal Democrat background who relished the fact that being a Tory marked them out from the rest of their family and sometimes from the area they grew up in, too.
Looks like I was ahead of the curve.
One new recruit to the Tories, Caroline Hunt, 18, said: “In a way the role of opposition is to be the rebel, so yes it is a bit rebellious. Our lecturers at college are very left wing and they couldn’t believe how many of us were Tories all of a sudden. Out of a small class, eight of us put our hands up and said we were strong Conservatives”.
The ’68 generation may just be about to learn that what goes around, comes around.
And, by the way, a note to all readers: if you have a good idea, act on it immediately. The world will not wait for you.
I’m back onto Cuba again but, hey, it’s not my fault. The buggers keep provoking me.
But at least I can now look back on a certain record of achievement on this particular subject. No sooner have I intimated that Cuba’s allegedly splendiferous health-care and education statistics were probably a crock, then up pops cast-iron confirmation courtesy of this hilarious bit of fawnography in the Guardian:
Which only goes to reinforce what has long been obvious: that US hostility to Cuba does not stem from the regime’s human rights failings, but its social and political successes and the challenge its unyielding independence offers to other US and western satellite states. Saddled with a siege economy and a wartime political culture for more than 40 years, Cuba has achieved first world health and education standards in a third world country, its infant mortality and literacy rates now rivalling or outstripping those of the US, its class sizes a third smaller than in Britain.
Which goes a long way to explaining why untold numbers of Americans are risking their lives every year in order to escape from America and get a better life in Cuba.
Er, no, wait a sec…that’s the other way around:
Untold numbers of Cubans flee the island every year, trying to cross to nearby Florida – including via a truck turned into a raft this week.
Have these ‘untold numbers’ of Cubans all gone stark, raving mad? Who, in their right minds, would want to risk being eaten by sharks in order to get away from first-class health-care and education? Don’t these insane Cubans realise just how poor, miserable, stupid and sick they are going to be in America?
Some ungrateful people just don’t deserve ‘social and political successes’.
I think it safe to say that all those people in the British political and media classes who want this country to be ‘more European’ have good cause to feel quietly satisfied today because parts of Britain are, indeed, starting to resemble East Germany:
The image of hundreds of people queuing to register with an NHS dentist provided a stark reminder of the problems people encounter in finding an NHS dentist, experts say.
They need ‘experts’ to tell them this?
The queue was prompted by the announcement that a practice in Carmarthen, Wales, could take on 300 more patients – but many more were hoping to register.
The TV news has now picked up on this story and are reporting that over 600 people turned up in the hope of getting state dental treatment. They lined up along the street and had to be issued with lottery tickets in order to prevent disputes breaking out. Over half of them were turned away.
Dr John Renshaw of the British Dental Association told BBC News Online: “That picture evoked a Third World country, where you have to queue to access what ought to be part of NHS care.”
No, that picture evoked life behind the Iron Curtain where people queued up all day to get a meal. And for the same reasons!
I quite often stumble across snippets of news which touch upon so many big themes and ideas that they would easily support an entire political thesis. As it is, and as it’s blogging here, I shall confine my comments to the mere immediate and obvious.
And I suppose the most obvious conclusion to be drawn from this item is that the Home Office is not the only department of government to have embraced the desire for ID cards:
The Department of Health yesterday called for the use of identity cards to prove entitlement to free care as it acted to put an end to “health tourism” – the exploitation of NHS loopholes by visitors from abroad.
To avoid problems of racial discrimination everyone would have to show their card before they received non-emergency treatment.
In the meantime the prospect of proving identity or residency by showing a passport or a utility bill is being considered.
No surprises there really. HMG is running out of money so cutbacks in largesse are the order of the day (okay, today) and, in the first instance, that means no more free health-care for foreigners. In the fullness of time this restriction will extend to the elderly, children and, quite possibly, the sick.
We also now know (as if we didn’t already suspect) that ID cards are not just Mr.Blunkett’s obsession but a technocratic fetish that has gripped our entire governing elite. I wholly expect to see successive government departments producing their own niche raisons d’ID card’ over the coming months.
There is a damn good argument that can be used to undermine the state here but, in order to wield it effectively, our friends on the left are going to have to embrace that time-honoured (but generally despised) libertarian truism about public ‘services’ eventually becoming public ‘masters’.
‘Free’ ends up being very expensive.
‘The British police are the best in the world’.
Believe it or not, that was a phrase I heard all the time when I was growing up. It was repeated so often and with such unshakeable conviction that it practically entered the folklore. The police were seen as the very embodiment of the British belief in ‘firmness but fairness’ and their stewardship of a remarkably pacific country was as much a given feature of life as clement weather or fertile topsoil.
I do not know whether or not it has ever been true but I can understand the reasons why it was so widely believed. There was a time when the British police were charged with enforcing reasonable laws (in what was equally widely assumed to be the ‘freest country in the world’) and they managed to do so with reasonable efficiency while maintaining a public image of politeness and deference. British ‘bobbies’ were seen as less ‘trigger-happy’ and ‘gung-ho’ than their US counterparts and less corrupt and brutal than their European ones.
Does this axiom hold water today? Someone should ask the staff of Huntingdon Life Sciences:
Staff who work for HLS, the animal laboratory, have been under attack for four years. But the violence is about to become a lot worse, reports Andrew Alderson
On Thursday, 1,200 company employees will be sent a short, factual e-mail by their management. It will warn them that animal rights activists are planning a 48-hour weekend of action from midnight on August 1 and staff should take extra care over their safety at home.
For two days and nights, employees of Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) will face an even greater likelihood of having bricks thrown through their windows, their cars covered in paint-stripper, incendiary devices put through their letter boxes and hooded men attacking them as they walk from the car to the front door.
→ Continue reading: Left twisting in the wind
All governments love boasting about their achievements and HMG is no exception. A particular favourite boast for the current lot is how many jobs they have created since they came to power. Sounds good, doesn’t it.
But there is a whole world of difference between job creation and wealth creation. In fact, the two things can be mutually exclusive:
Labour has hired 344,000 extra people to work for the Government since it took office, with the state now employing 5.3m people, or one in five of the workforce, according to figures released yesterday.
Until Labour was elected, the government payroll had fallen for 15 years, mostly thanks to the privatisations of the 1980s, but that is now being reversed by a massive public spending spree funded from tax rises.
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are overseeing a hiring bonanza. Hundreds of thousands are joining the public sector, especially in the National Health Service, where 160,000 more staff have been taken on. The NHS now employs about 1.3m people, reputed to be more than any other civilian organisation in the world apart from the Indian railway.
If those people working in the shrinking private sector want to know exactly why they have to hand over more of their income and savings every year to their government, I suggest that they look here for an answer.
It would not surprise me in the least if an internal memo had been circulated around all departments of HMG reminding staff to spend at least some part of their day rummaging down the backs of sofas and armchairs and remitting all and any recovered coinage to the Treasury. I honestly think they must be getting that desperate for money.
From the UK Times (so no link):
THE home secretary wants to add a £35 surcharge to fixed penalty notices, such as parking tickets and speeding fines, to boost the state compensation fund for victims of crime, leaked cabinet papers reveal.
The controversial move, approved by Gordon Brown, the chancellor, will be seen as another Labour stealth tax.
The “victims’ surcharge” would apply to a range of misdemeanours, including motoring offences, littering, dog fouling and graffiti as well as yobbish or drunken behaviour. The extra £35 would be added to the fixed penalty.
It won’t be ‘seen’ as another ‘stealth tax, it is another bloody stealth tax and one that will, as per usual, fall almost entirely onto the shoulders of the middle-classes, the property owning, the business-running and the law-abiding. But they are precisely the people HMG wants to target because, simply, they are the people who actually have something to take. The threat to exact the ‘surcharge’ from petty criminals is pure fantasy as such people seldom pay the fines that are already imposed on them and typically do not have the means to do so.
The promise to use this money for ‘victims of crime’ is, I’m afraid, yet another howler. Just as with the Road Fund Licence (which was introduced on the promise that the collected revenue was going to go solely to road construction and maintenance) the extra revenue will quickly get swept into the general tax take where it is urgently needed to prop up the failing public sector.
However there is something apposite about calling this a ‘victims of crime’ fund because, in a way, it is chillingly accurate. The ‘victims’ being anybody in this country with something to lose and the criminals being their own government.
Only the BBC could possibly publish a full-page editorial about the 50th anniversary of Castro’s revolution in Cuba without once mentioning the word ‘communism’. Not overlooked, however, is a bit of fawning over the Beard himself:
Mr Castro, then a 26-year-old revolutionary, led about 120 fighters in a raid on the Moncada barracks – with a garrison of about 800 soldiers – on 26 July 1953.
So brave! So dashing! So bold! Our hero! (swoon).
Still there are some brief, grudging but nonetheless damning admissions:
His country has gone from being the third-richest in Latin America to one of the poorest.
Its economy now relies heavily on funds sent from Cubans abroad and on tourism.
Untold numbers of Cubans flee the island every year, trying to cross to nearby Florida – including via a truck turned into a raft this week.
Grim reading indeed but completey overshadowed, of course, by Castro’s laudable ‘humanitarian achievements’:
Cuba boasts the highest life expectancy in Latin America and one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world.
It has one doctor per 166 people and one of the most extensive free public health systems in the world.
It also has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, with just over 95% of the population being able to read.
Makes you wonder why so many Cubans are so hell-bent on getting the flock out of Cuba. Perhaps they are all ‘extreme right-wingers’.
In any event, I wonder if those oft-touted statistics actually bear any resemblance to reality? Or are they, like Soviet grain harvesting figures, a mere device to provide Western leftists with a tool of apologia. The ‘best healthcare in the world’ schtick is now such familiar copybook mummery that it is even accepted by people who should know better. Perhaps somebody should ask those fleeing Cubans what life is really like.
Tony Martin has no shortage of supporters. Unfortunately, he has no shortage of sworn enemies either:
Relatives of Fred Barras, the burglar shot dead by Tony Martin, last night warned that the Norfolk farmer will be murdered after his release tomorrow.
One cousin of Barras said Martin was “going to get it”, while another said a hitman would be hired if the dead teenager’s associates failed to carry out a retaliatory attack.
I do believe that threatening to murder someone is a criminal offence. Since these would-be assassins have already revealed themselves to a newspaper, identification should not be a problem and I therefore assume that the police will be rounding these people up.
Or do they only spring into action when otherwise law-abiding people ‘threaten’ to defend themselves?
I disagree with those people who claim that Tony Blair is delusional or psychotic. I think he might have a better grip on reality than many of his detractors claim. For example, he appears to be under no illusions about how unpopular both he and his wretched government have become:
Tony Blair has put off the launch of a plan to compel every Briton to hold an ID card in response to fears that it will turn into an expensive and frustrating assault on liberty.
But why should this exercise prove either ‘expensive’ or ‘frustrating’ if, as Mr.Blunkett assures us, the ‘vast majority’ of the public are in favour of the scheme?
I suspect that the truth is grubbier but no less welcome. A weakened and frightened Tony Blair realises that if Blunkett is allowed to press ahead with his despotic little plans the result will be widespread civil disobedience and a PR disaster.
Maybe we can still win this.
It is a central plank of federast propoganda that the European Union is the only way to stop conflagrations like WWI and WWII from happening again. I have always regarded such pronouncements as specious self-delusion. Indeed, certain features of life in wartime Europe are beginning to re-appear, such as austerity, rationing and empty shelves:
Gardeners were banned from buying dozens of pesticides from yesterday under new European rules. The 80 gardening products, mostly lawn treatments, have been withdrawn from the shelves. They can be used until the end of December.
They include many sold by major retailers including B&Q, Asda and Do It All, and are being banned alongside 135 agricultural products.
Thus we are saved from the cataclysmic horror of law treatments. Household cleaning products are probably next.
Nor is this the end but merely the beginning for what we are seeing is the EU’s ‘precautionary principle’ in action. As a result, thousands of chemicals used everyday, domestically and commercially, now have to be subjected to an exhaustive and expensive testing procedure to ensure that they post not the even the merest smidgeon of a hint of a suggestion of a risk to health. This is despite that face that, in most cases, these chemical products have been used for years, even decades, without anyone growing three heads as a consequence.
For many, particularly smaller scale, producers the cost of compliance means bankruptcy so they simply withdraw the products from sale. Result: a gradual emptying of shelves.
And who, exactly, is behind it? As if we couldn’t guess:
Friends of the Earth welcomed the move but raised doubts as to whether the outlawed pesticides would be disposed of properly. The environmental pressure group also claimed some products were not covered by the ban despite being proven to damage human health.
Yes, the enviro-mentalists. Europe’s ‘jihadis’; they may be self-righteous creeps with faces one can never can tired of punching but they have managed to secure themselves a svengali-like grip on the minds of Europe’s Cardinals.
By this time next year, Samizata articles will be written on papyrus scrolls and distributed to our readers by mule-train.
What with termination of the Iraqi regime, George Bush in the Whitehouse, Bersluconi bestriding Europe and internecine war between the Labour government and the BBC, the editors of the Guardian must be scratching around urgently for some news they can celebrate.
They have finally found some: the emergence of the next generation of guardianistas:
The public sector is now the most popular choice of employer for graduates, new research revealed today.
In a Mori poll, 32% of students said they would like to work for a public sector organisation – ahead of blue chip companies and small to medium enterprises.
On the face of it, the revelation that nearly a third of graduates want to devote their lives to consuming taxes and finding ever-more bizarre ways to spend other people’s money, should be somewhat alarming. But maybe it is simply a doleful recognition that the private sector has little use for people who have spent three or four years immersed in ‘Gay Studies’ or the ‘History of Yoghurt’.
I suspect the real culprit here is the addle-brained article of faith for our political elites that lack of personal achievement is inextricably linked to feelings of self-esteem, especially the self-esteem that grows from having ‘qualifications’ regardless of how bogus they might actually be. It was this conviction that led to an explosion of state-backed ‘universities’ which tossed out potemkin qualifications like Palestinian candy.
The result, however, is no an upgrading of people but rather a downgrading of education to the point where image of a ‘graduate’ as a steely-witted young go-getter has been reduced to a laughable myth.
Graduate Prospects’ chief executive, Mike Hill, said: “The public sector has a great deal to offer young graduates looking for their first job, not least working conditions that often mean a better balanced life. This can include flexible hours, home-working, job-share and better holidays.
And that, for me, is the ‘money’ quote. Isn’t the term ‘better balanced life’ really a polite euphamsim for ‘easy ride’? Perhaps these prospective graduates have lost none of the survival instincts they were born with and are unwilling to undergo the rigours of the private sector that they know will shred their fragile intellects. Hence, find me a sinecure and find it quick.
“In addition, many graduates want to feel they are doing something good for society in their work. Research by the audit commission found that wanting to have a positive effect on people’s lives was the main reason why staff chose the public sector. That makes it an attractive option for graduates.”
As if we need a bigger army of Diversity Development Outreach Co-ordinators in order to set off the harmful effects on society of all those greedy people who devote their lives to the selfish pursuits of trade, innovation and enterprise.
I am willing to wager that it is the highly selfish pursuit of soft options and not sham altruism which is lying at the root of this new trend. But, let’s face it, the alleged desire to ‘do good for society’ sounds a lot more like the kind of thing that the paladins of the education establishment want to hear. But that is still a problem because clearly the education establishment is committed to pushing this message to its charges and, for as long as that is still happening, then the assembled forced of reason have a long march ahead of them.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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